Americans should fight less, learn more
and grandchildren have a bright future.
The primary caveats are that electrifying has to be done quickly and completely.
The book is available on Amazon as a hardcover or a Kindle.
Dennis Griffin, Carlsbad
We citizens of the United States found a lot to fight about during 2021. We’d have fought less had we known more. I didn’t fight with anyone. I was busy reading about what others were fighting about.
I read about China. Against dire warnings of catastrophic consequences in the face of a militaristic China, there is Jonathan D. T. Ward’s “China’s Vision of Victory.” I was struck by how different conceptions of time affect how Americans think about China. We think in two-year election cycles; the Chinese think in hundreds of years. As some folks have remarked, the U.S. has the watches, but China has the time.
Yuri Pines’ “The Everlasting Empire” offered two mottos that permeate Chinese history, one that is instructive regarding our understanding of China, as well as our responsibility for our own country: “Stability is Unity.” The other is, “All Under Heaven.” The first represents we the people pulling in the same direction. The second represents 5,000 years of a largely united Chinese history. I spent some of 2021 trying to understand what appeared to be our recent discovery of China and remembering that discoverers define the discovered on the discoverer’s terms. I wondered about the extent to which our discoverer’s terms are inaccurate.
Hilary Spurling’s “Pearl Buck in China” includes a comment from Buck, wife of a Christian missionary, that resonated for me with respect to both China and the United States: “We simply cannot express the Gospel with any force if we have hidden within us a sense of racial superiority.” Her word, “hidden,” means a sense of racial superiority that can reside within us, unknown to us. Perhaps that accounts for the resistance to what is so obvious about our racial divide.
Related to our resistance, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “Racism Explained To My Daughter” is laden with examples of responsibility for the racial divide in our country. He refers to how “fear, anger, guilt and a sense of white-skinned entitlement commingle to drive wedges between public words and private actions.”
I spent a fair amount of time during 2021 grappling with that one because the year found me reading Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” and “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Robert Reich’s “The Common Good,” Jane J. Mansbridge’s “Beyond Adversary Democracy” and Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth.” We citizens of this constitutional republic found a lot to fight about, curiously over possibly ill-informed perspectives on our racial divide, economics, international affairs and how the pandemic seemed to make some of us exercise a frightful misconception of what freedom means. The titles in this paragraph could serve to inform those of us who want to be informed.
This meander through a sample of my 2021 readings ends with two titles without which most any other readings have little use. I read again “The Federalist Papers,” specifically Numbers 10 and 29, and the United States Constitution.
Leif Fearn, Bankers Hill